Damon & Naomi's Pierre Etoile is now available for pay what you want on Bandcamp

Damon & Naomi's first release after Galaxie 500 split up was the lovely Pierre Etoile which is now available from their Bandcamp page for whatever you want to pay.

Pierre Etoile

The beautiful three track EP was recorded before Galaxie 500 split up and includes a brilliant earl version of This Car Climbed Mt. Washington and In The Sun with Damon on vocals, a new version appeared on Playback Singers a few years later with Naomi singing. The third track is the brilliant, yet otherwise unreleased, Nineteen Sixty-Nine

The EP was released on Rough Trade around the time that Galaxie 500's split was announced so the press was accompanied by those heartbreaking stories.

This is where the plot really thickens…Returning from a European tour last December, tentative plans were made to record an EP to sound out ideas for the next album, and do it in a different studio with a different producer […] Dean had other ideas.

Damon: “He came back after Christmas and said he didn't want to do an EP […] But we had ideas for this EP and still wanted to try a new studio, so Dean was like, ‘just do it on your own’.”

So what is the future? It's not Pierre Etoile, even I know that much. Pierre Etoile wasn't even originally intended as a solo (duo?) project. back when Naomi and Damon started working together on some new songs in January. Rather, the three songs being released on Rough Trade next week were intended as the basis of a new Galaxie RP, but Dean was on extended break in New Zealand and when he came back he didn't want to work on them.

Hence, Pierre Etoile can't help sounding similar to Galaxie 500 &endash; e whispered intonations, the same inherent sadness and hopelessness in the gentle, almost pastoral guitars and drums

[…]

“We were very conscious of not doing something that smacked of a solo project, because we always valued the idea of the band as a collective,” Naomi explains. “We never felt comfortable with the idea of Pierre Etoile.”